The present application relates to software and more specifically to User Interface (UI) designs and methods for facilitating software modifications, such as modifications to UI models, data models, and accompanying UI display screen appearance and functionality.
Systems and methods for facilitating manipulating UI display screen features and functionality are employed in various demanding applications, including enterprise software development tools, general database design software, website development tools, and so on. Such applications often demand user friendly mechanisms for adding features and functionality to a UI display screen (e.g., “page”), such as by adding custom fields, enabling access to certain web services, modifying underlying data models, and so on, without requiring extensive software development skills or technical expertise.
Conventionally, software for facilitating UI modification required technical experts, e.g., developers, to develop code and deploy the code. To overcome technical knowledge requirements and time-consuming software code manipulation, some software applications employ separate UI manipulation programs with separate UI display screens designed to facilitate high-level UI modifications. For example, a special UI setup application may enable users to manipulate UI code of another application. After code modifications, the user may then redeploy the modified application; then navigate back to the modified UI display screen.
Such approaches to facilitating UI screen modification typically require users to switch between runtime and setup pages and further require users to know how to correlate options in setup pages with specific UI features to be customized or added.
However, users may not know or recall what to search for, how to search for it, or how to navigate to applicable sections of setup pages. Users may mistake an object corresponding to a UI feature to be customized with another object or UI feature or section shown in a setup screen. Furthermore, extensive UI feature changes may require multiple navigations between runtime pages and setup pages, which can be time-consuming and error prone.